One for all or one for one? The influence of Cultural Dimensions in Virtual Agents

Abstract

With the increase in the development of autonomous agents, there is a bigger demand on their capability of interacting with other agents and users in ways that are natural and inspired by how humans interact. However, cultural aspects have been largely neglected so far, even though they are a crucial aspect of human societies. Our goal is to create an architecture able to model cultural groups of agents with perceivable distinct behaviour. In particular, this paper focus on how to use two cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede in order to influence the agent’s goal selection and appraisal processes. Using our cultural architecture, we created two cultural groups of agents and asked users to visualise them performing a short emergent story. We then asked them to describe the two groups visualised. Results confirmed that users did perceived differences in the groups, and those differences were congruent with the cultural parametrisation used.

@inproceedings { mascarenhas09,
abstract = {With the increase in the development of autonomous agents, there is a bigger demand on their capability of interacting with other agents and users in ways that are natural and inspired by how humans interact. However, cultural aspects have been largely neglected so far, even though they are a crucial aspect of human societies. Our goal is to create an architecture able to model cultural groups of agents with perceivable distinct behaviour. In particular, this paper focus on how to use two cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede in order to influence the agent’s goal selection and appraisal processes. Using our cultural architecture, we created two cultural groups of agents and asked users to visualise them performing a short emergent story. We then asked them to describe the two groups visualised. Results confirmed that users did perceived differences in the groups, and those differences were congruent with the cultural parametrisation used.},
address = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands},
booktitle = {IVA'2009 - 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents},
keywords = {virtual agents, synthetic cultures, culture dimensions},
month = {September},
pages = {272-286},
publisher = {Springer Berlin / Heidelberg},
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
title = {One for all or one for one? The influence of Cultural Dimensions in Virtual Agents},
volume = {5773/2009},
year = {2009},
author = {Samuel Mascarenhas and João Dias and Rui Prada and Ana Paiva}
}